Web Design, Blog Design, And Graphic Design

Menu

Tag Archives: Gimp

I got the company set up on Google plus the other night. There’s nothing there right now, but I figured I may as well do it sooner than later. A few things have changed over there, and the avatar or profile image is a little different. I thought I’d do a quick Gimp tutorial on centering a profile picture or user avatar on Google Plus.

The profile picture is still 250 x 250 however the image is circled now, so friends, family, and followers will only see the center of the image posted. This easy tutorial will teach you how to center the image just right, and if you use something other than Gimp like Photoshop, or Paint Shop you should be able to make this work as well.

Open Gimp or the image manipulation program of your choice and make a new document, 250 x 250. Now use your fill tool and select the color you want to use as a background and click inside the document. Now open up the image you want to use as the profile pic as a new image or document. Click copy, and then paste it as a new layer in the profile document. Press the scale tool and scale the image to 250 x 250. Now with the ellipse tool start at the upper left hand corner of the document and drag it down to the bottom right hand corner of the document. This should give you a circle of dotted lines or marching ants that just touch each side of the document. You’re really just using the ellipse tool as a guide, to place your image in. The circle is exactly how your image will be centered. Now click on the move tool, center your image, and your done. At the top of your window, go to Select, and click none. This removes the ellipse, and then click file, export, and name the file whatever you_want.jpg. Your done, you now have a perfectly centered profile or avatar pic for Google Plus.

Here’s how mine came out. You can see it in action here. While you’re there make sure to add us if you found this helpful. Hoped this helped and thanks for reading !

I’m not really sure the exact direction the blog is going to take. I plan on creating a compendium of all things graphic design, web design, and probably photography related as well. I also want a place to showcase the work of new-aeon-design.com. This afternoon I thought about doing a picture a week of some different photography produced here. Although I’ve posted images all over the internet with out a copyright signature, I thought now that I have the domain I should probably sign and copyright every image posted here. Then I thought , if I do that I may as well post my first Gimp tutorial. So, today I will teach you how to create a Copyright Signature brush to use on all your designs, and photography.

This is an image of a barn at rest area found just outside of Ellicotivlle N.Y.

I’m using Gimp2.8 for this tutorial, however if you use Photoshop, or any of the other programs out there you can probably follow along and make this work.

First thing you want to do is load up Gimp2.8 and go to FILE ,CREATE NEW.

Set the width to 300 and height to 200.

Click on ADVANCED OPTIONS, change COLOR SPACE to GREYSCALE and Fill BACKGROUND COLOR. By default it should be set to white.o.k.

Now for the copyright symbol you want to find a character map. I’m pretty sure every operating system comes with one of these pre installed. I use Linux with KDE and used KcharSelect. In Windows I think there is a character map in accessories. If you’re using KDE just open up your terminal program, type kcharselect, and the program should open for you. Now , once you have your character map open, search for the Ⓒ symbol and copy it to clipboard.

Return to Gimp, click on the TEXT TOOL, select your font, and type your signature into your work space. Then click to the beginning of the text and paste the copyright symbol at the beginning of your signature. Highlight all the text in the text box, size it to your desired size, at the top of your window click IMAGE, AUTOCROP IMAGE. We’re almost done.

Now we want to save the file as a .gbr file and place the file in the Gimp brushes folder. This will very from system to system depending on how you have yours set up. On my computer it’s in the home/username/.gimp2.8/brushes folder. So at the top of the window go to FILE, click on EXPORT, and then save it to /home/username/.gimp2.8/brushes/ and export it as signature.gbr which will save the file and make it a gbr or brush file for you.

Now click refresh button found at the bottom of the brushes dialog box and the brush should appear. Open up a new photo, create a new transparent layer, adjust your brush size and try out your new copyright signature brush ! Happy Photographing !